Gardening at Night
Niamh Campbell - The Pig’s Back, Issue Two
When I was quite young my boyfriend of three years proposed to me and gave me a garnet ring. There was a sincere, suffering, friendship between us, but we were not going to make a successful marriage – it felt more like a bluff that got out of hand. On the night of the engagement we ate at the restaurant at the top of the Tate Modern and drank a half-bottle of champagne. There survives a photo of me taken by the Embankment, wearing cut-off dungarees and pricking up thumbs by a mounted 2012 Olympics poster because its map of the UK showed Northern Ireland detached and floating apart like a pickled brain. Apparently I’d never seen one of those before.
Some weeks later, on another night, as we walked home to our flat in NW, a drunk crunched a car into the perimeter wall of a park about ten yards ahead. It happened just as we were walking, out of nowhere on a quiet stretch of street, but we hardly reacted. All was silent for a moment, awkwardly still, before the car lurched in reverse and U-turned and screeched off in the direction of Abbey Road. At the flat I phoned the police and found them unimpressed, but as I spoke I held my ring up in the lamplight idly, and observed for the first time there was a word printed into the band – vášeň, Czech for passion. I remember the grief and shame of realising this was not what I felt. Within months the boy and I had separated.
Aren’t we entitled to passion, in love?
At school, I can remember writing and reading aloud an essay that scorned the wedding industry for comic effect. I was only fifteen but I had witnessed cousins and neighbours doing it, observed innumerable angry-looking women hoisting crinolines into syrupy limousines. My conclusion was passion, passion would save us from this dimly humiliating world of over-eager and visible aspiration, of FakeBake and cabbage water and nude lipstick – which is to say I was not dismissing the world of weddings at all but signalling myself as above the gaucheness of the Celtic Tiger. Jia Tolentino makes a similar show of horror at the outsized commercialism of American wedding pageantry in her essay ‘I Thee Dread’, from Trick Mirror. When I teach Trick Mirror to my undergrads they say, ‘Jia is trying to represent herself in a certain way’ and, notwithstanding their propensity to refer to writers by their first names – kind of jarring, like they’re pals or something – I found this acuity impressive. Being exceptionally sunny Gen Z kids, they don’t make observations like that very often. But of course, women of conventional tendencies, with relatively spare but rigid skincare principles and a heterosexuality so literal and entrenched it is the erotic equivalent of an open hand slammed down on a tabletop, still want to be coupled, just not like those people.
I also show the students Lauren Oyler’s ‘Ha ha! Ha ha!’, a riposte to Tolentino’s photogenic valedictorian dissent. But for some reason – sweetness probably – they don’t get it.
At the time of my engagement, when I was so young, these things were not really in play. It was not for fear of crinolines or biscuit cake enrobed in icing, striped with chocolate straws, that I pulled away. Rather, the idea I had was a hiding from life – that this would be warehousing myself – and no matter how frightened I was of being alone my intuition shucked me out of that and sent me wandering without a template for almost ten years, like a fairy tale.
Still under a spell, shortly after I turned thirty, I found myself couch-surfing in the storeroom of a bookshop in a continental city for a few weeks. A friend had arranged it to help counteract my pronounced sense of depressive entrapment in Dublin, some of which resulted from a relationship ending with such libellous violence I’ve never been able to write about it. The couch in this case was an exquisitely thin slice of foam on a daybed beneath heaving shelves of unbought second-hand books that I sat up reading or rereading (The Good Soldier, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a tea-stained illustrated biography of Isabella Duncan). There was a whole shelf of Camus, a shelf of Stendhal, a coffee table Tao Te Ching. I felt deeply miserable.
The owners of the bookshop, a couple, were splitting up. Each day she lit a taper of incense in the anteroom and brewed wrathful flowery tea; he hung around chatting, grindingly content it seemed, with his new girlfriend. I stepped around their tension silently. I put on thick makeup every day. I traipsed the city, drinking coffee, eating nuts, visiting cold and ugly Bourbon architecture, weeping beneath semi-melted statues in municipal parks. What placed my sadness into jagged relief was the application, I think, of yet another template. This time that of the healthy and upbeat millennial Eurotripper. Life still grazed and rubbed around me ill-fittingly, a set of gestures and reflexes I couldn’t decode. I thought of walking the Camino. I thought of disappearing into the countryside. I thought of London again, Paris. I phoned, in the end, old friends and exes and tried to explain what was happening in a way that might invite guidance: I don’t know what I’m doing, how I should be living, etcetera. In this mode of hysterical divestment I found no peace but, when I got back to Dublin, one of the friends met up with me.
‘If you want to get married,’ he offered, ‘I can marry you.’
‘We’re not in love,’ I pointed out.
His face was pained. ‘But we’re good to one another,’ he said. He felt lost as well, he felt sick of it all. We sat outside a franchise cafe with sticky pastries between us, cigarette butts in the plastic tray, old rain waiting in a groove, reflecting streaks of sun. Why were we sitting outside? The weather must have been nice. He was quiet, uncharacteristically vehement, rebounding from something, and it was all rather compromising.
‘Yes,’ I conceded. We did tend to be good to one another.
‘Even if we’re not in love,’ he said.
We’d spent the night together a handful of times, but never with sincerity. And yet, I had to think about it, and what it might mean – building a modular house on his parents’ land, the little rutted roads into the nearest town I’d learn to drive along, a baby in a padded seat behind me cooing cluelessly at the sheer drops of mountain passes overhead; the exams he would re-take to qualify as a solicitor as I stood over him and asked test questions, pacing primly up and down the thickly-lighted picture window of the modular house, which would be small but comfortable and just within the legal limits of non-residential planning permission. He was one of the two men I’ve dated to own licensed shotguns. I was looking at the outlines of a credible life I, dispositionally speaking, might lean into if I got myself together.
I lived in a houseshare, then, with a young widow. She was trying to restart her life, forcing herself on dates woodenly, running baths and pushing a turned-back thumb to the point of tension between her eyes. Late at night, if she did go out, we would hear the desultory clump of her heels tossed off in the doorway, the passage of her slender body down the central corridor, the rolling kettle ahead of her cup of tea. She told me very little about her husband, only that she still dreamed of him and, in particular, woke to hearing his key in the lock. ‘The longing,’ she said simply. She was private and practical but no other man, in the time I knew her, could make up for him.
‘No,’ I told my friend in the café at last. ‘We have to believe in better for ourselves. We have to be in love.’ In the saying of it, this pat cinematic thing, I realised how true it was.
He’s married now, to someone else – two children. Vášeň.
I regretted it once, and only once. I was visiting newlywed friends and eating dinner with a group of people at a long table in their high-ceilinged white kitchen. Our festivity redoubled in the French doors. The radio was set to a German station that burred in the background and played shoegaze, unobtrusive electronica, and someone told a surprisingly frightening ghost story about dismounting from a cab outside their parents’ house in adolescence. Someone, or something, was standing tall and chalkily blurred on the opposite side of the street, at the edge of the fields. It watched. The kid, spooked, sprinted inside and sat watching television by himself – it was late, the small hours of the morning – but the television went in and out of focus, the reception turned to intermittent fuzz, as if, he said, someone or something was messing with the aerial, which was mounted to the roof. He knew, in that preternatural teenage way, that this was the being that had waited whitely across the street for him. It wanted his attention. It could only be malevolent.
We applauded this. Someone put a stop to the ghost stories – we were disturbed. I visited the bathroom and, looking at my own reflection in the mirror in that way we have been trained to do by cinema and cinematic fiction, a gesture as hammy as melodrama but softened by poignancy, I thought at once how nice it would be to have an easy and amiable partner with me at these things: how nice to sink into the semi-privacy of a couple and to be less conspicuous. Even without true love. And I thought that if I’d married my friend he would never do those things my father did after evening’s out, coming home wild with some kind of indignation or sense of inferiority, raging and snapping and spitting criticisms at my mother as she sat in the cavernous mahogany corner of the front room with a mug of tea and closed her eyes, saintlike, enduring, diminished but inhabiting a sunken sort of righteousness. And I think on reflection now that Tolentino’s aversion to the commercial is blithely relatable – who doesn’t agree? – but the bleak cell of the bad marriage, the nervous system fried alive by omnipresent tension, has been a greater source of fear to me.
My father phoned me in the early weeks of the pandemic, unexpected. He spoke with sternly prepared directness. ‘Happy birthday,’ he said. ‘Do you need money?’
‘It’s ok,’ I told him in shock. ‘I sold a book.’ And then, out of superstition: ‘I mean not for much, but I have a job.’
‘Is it a job-job?’ My father demanded.
‘Yes,’ I said. It was not.
I was shocked because I don’t hear from my father often, once a year really, and the tension between us can accelerate. I got no birthday call when the book itself came out, on account of its contents, for instance. This year, however, he was warm towards me. I was moved – I was thirty-two, standing in the kitchenette carving up Aldi sourdough, which I had become swiftly dependant on in early lockdown, and which I had been warned was not sourdough but something with sourdough essence sprayed onto it, like a scented candle.
‘Your stepsister is married,’ my father said.
I knew this already. I’d seen photographs on Facebook of her walking down the aisle with her oldest child, and I’d been taken by the defiant sweetness of the gesture on behalf of a fellow ill-parented girl. I’d felt happy for her and sorry about the weather on the day, since I knew the venue and you really need good weather for a wedding at that venue. The ceremony takes place outdoors and the indoors is only a kind of greenhouse crush, dressed drably, and far too small. As we spoke, I walked up and down the length of the balcony wall, which was entirely glass, and looked out on the other high-rise apartments, the canal.
I was renting a room in a place divided between expensive semi-detached houses like hallucinations – rooms always several clever feet smaller than they ought to be, creepingly – and buy-to-rent flats with stairwells reeking of weed. The apartment beneath us had lately gone to the darkest side, housing a procession of dead-eyed twentysomethings, until one day a drug debt collector blasted up and down outside dragging the wheel of a metal bin against the road surface and screaming threats. Soon after one of my housemates and I descended the stairs on a Sunday morning, heading out to Aldi, to find the place raided and a guard on the landing with a taser in his hand.
‘Some neighbours you have here!’ he cried to us.
The taser by his hip looked like a compact whip; holding it, he had the aspect of a merry coachman in Castle Rackrent, a race type unperturbed by life on the burning ring of D15. I didn’t mention this to my father. It was bad enough not having a job-job, by which he meant answering phones in a retail unit, which is what my stepsisters do, and good for them.
At one time my stepmother would have known about this, the strange and lame employment, anyway. She used to monitor me far more carefully through spies, emissaries, guile. Getting away and moving to a world whose values were unintelligible to her, which is to say a more robustly bourgeois one, was at first a source of satisfaction but now, taking this phone call like a stranger, I felt almost offended that nobody was trying to get to the bottom of me. At one time she had an incredible facility with cynical accuracy: she told my sister and I, for example, that we were of the ideal type favoured by the Vanishing Triangle killer, an abductor of pale and slight brunettes in the greater Dublin/Wicklow area for a period in the 1990s. I mean, this is basically true – we do look just like the missing girls, or did in the suspension of puberty – but to observe as much and say it our loud requires a nose for danger so evolved, so viperously targeted, so proximate to wishful thinking, it is almost breath-taking. In a less successful stab at wicked omnipotence, she also claimed our grandmother had forewarned her about my beautiful younger sister, then just fourteen years of age.
Your sister, she relayed to me, controls her father with her eyes.
We still spill about laughing at that one – with her eyes!
My sister is also in her thirties now. Her first daughter is two years old. We spend Sundays sitting faded out by the week in opposite armchairs, and the baby is frustrated if she doesn’t get attention – she pretends to leave us, opening and shutting the door to the hall to call out more and more filibustering goodbyes, to give us a chance to repent. We smile and say bye-bye, bye-bye! She barks back bye-bye mama, bye-bye Ni-Ni, bye-bye buggy, bye-bye cat, bye-bye spiders, bye-bye spoon! Our mother used to say we would feel the shocking weight of our father’s departure and slow, rather packaged-out, abandonment when we had children of our own, but I felt it fully then for what it was. When he left, I was the gangly twelve-year-old who still climbed onto his lap in the evenings to watch Time Team. As part of a kindly bargain on his final night in the house I asked to be taken back to Newgrange at some point, to see the burial chamber again.
I grew up in a country town that became a suburb incrementally, in the breadbasket of market gardening – Fingal, the Pale, the coast of North Dublin. I want to write about it, home. Spreading images, freighted with mood and tonality, come to me. I have a protagonist with no attributes yet, walking towards a house of semi-significance in my early life, a corner house of pebbledash, flicking at a smartphone screen, and something is waiting for them.
Summer nights in the place! Vášeň!
On summer nights houses and streets would lie open to one other complexly, like the braided stages of a video game, the single sustained consciousness-of-all-things decanted into separate angular aspects even as it remined all-encompassing, or rather this is how I remember it now. Warm fading stillness, skies of mauve and fleece. Boulders blocking laybys on the new orbital roads. Charmless nineteenth-century churches like chunks of rye loaf or some other punishing foodstuff visible from everywhere, above trees and streets, the smell of deep fat fryers warming up. Rapeseed. Children. In theory you could live a whole life there and be fine, except of course I hated it.
Right before lockdown, a schoolfriend and her partner bought a house in one of the new estates out there. When restrictions lifted, I went to visit them. The nervous narcissism of return –– the tremors of excitement and mythology on the train, watching the fields and the sea and estuary sprint in and out of sight behind the scrubby railside trees – is so much worse in a writer, whose ego makes no sense on the train. By the time I got there I was feeling sentimental. The evening again, the luminescent strata, lindens glowing in flat fields and hawthorns knotted up around the gravel of the station carpark. O saisons, o chateaux! Sinead picked me up in the same car she’s been picking me up in since college because I still don’t have a license. ‘We’re handy to the station,’ she claimed, before driving for a solid twenty minutes before even so much as a crossroads came into sight.
By this time I was living more or less by accident in a big brown nineties flat outside Kildare. The walls were brown, the floors were brown, or rather all the creams and fawns and russets that had been put into it were so tinged now the air itself seemed smoky as the smoked glass tabletop I ate my strict pandemic breakfast off each day. The only thing I liked about that flat was the wall of heavy fir trees behind it. These were so thick they cast the place in shade once intended, I guess, as a modesty screen, and I liked them because they felt animate, like ancestors. In the flat I had a breakup and finished my second novel, taking baths every night and listening to a podcast series about, at one point, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. There were days I thought I would never escape this brown bell jar of bad juju (I smudged, for the first time, copiously; I ordered bales of sage online) but when We Were Young, the novel itself, came out a year later I had moved away. The book features a screen of firs leaning like sponsors over the picture window of a house, and that is my tribute. A little slice of mise-en-scéne. After the breakup, in the brown flat, my breakfast became still more paranoidly austere – All Bran, boiled egg, Berocca Boost – because I was determined that everything I did would be pantomimically sane. I acted as though the flat were a mother superior, a parole officer. It kept me on the straight-and-narrow, really, but to escape at last and ride that panting train to Fingal was vitalising.
Nobody could hug. We tugged down our masks. I’ve always admired Sinead for her composure and abstemiousness, her hair at school never straying from a static centre part, the time we all visited her during her masters at Galway and she ordered tea and biscuits to the pub snug instead of gin. Now, a well-employed economist, she could afford to buy a later evolution of the kind of semi-d I’d grown up in. Sinead’s family, by contrast, lived in a bungalow bliss bungalow bunkered by a remote road near the Union ruin, and were consequently more country than mine. All her sisters were now married, and she would be the last. She had a ring from Appleby’s. She’d driven all the way to Cork for a coffee table, and gifted me an unused Dolce Gusto machine when she upgraded to Nespresso. Her fiancé, who is shy but always keenly kind to me, bought us takeaway and we ate at the pale oak table while the sun took hours going down and I felt as though I were a teenager again, in this land of long twilights siloed always in kitchen-dining rooms.
The art of losing / not hard to master. Look up and feel so much longing for something that doesn’t remember you.
I have this favourite place to go but I never pay for anything. It’s a florist, an expensive one, housed in an eighteenth-century building with cake-decoration mouldings and mouldering cornices smudged with spiderwebs. The smell of a florists is holy water and empty churches, suburban porches filled with geraniums, the monumental solemnity of poppy wreathes in a Protestant chapel, the sigh and cough and prayerbook dropped at the back of a cathedral. Its beauty feels permanent and yet busily decomposing. It’s the colours I like here: wildflower colours I call them, because I can’t quite account for it otherwise – a tendency to sullen purples and sudden yellows, cornflowers, in such random and yet insanely tasteful scatterings of balance, plosion, spores, salad. There are also dried fronds of pampas grass and crispened flowers in fluted vases, vases with thin bases, vases like the Rubin Vase of Gestalt psychology, and underneath the high roof and shallow architectural pendants these look like seasonal tributes in a shrine. This is the place I’m thinking of when I buy two packets of wildflower seed in the garden centre and set to ripping out the bulbs and filaments of weeds in a wooden planter outside his house.
It’s a morning full of work. I scoop out earth with a trowel – dried, biting with little stones – and replace it with new earth and am taken aback to realise when I open the plastic sack that yes, fertilizer is actual shit. You must trowel shit into the planter. You must make gouges in the soil and sink the lemon spreader, the morning glory, into these, then bed them down with shit. The happy shrill scrape of the trowel makes you feel peaceful and reminds me of gardening with my father in childhood. It’s warm but overcast, a weather chewing over something, waiting it out. You’re working faster, you think, glancing at his planter. Your competitive side, the compulsive greedy reaching glee, speeds up and flings blocks of compact earth from which fretty broad-leafed knobs of growth protrude into thin compost bags. You take a rod of wood with a metal tooth on the end to the blobby moss between the paving stones, stripping it off.
You pull up this weed, not that weed. You turn the folksy watering can on the planters, sprinkles winsomely unhurried, and you have to believe you’ll see the shrubs spread and become independent, especially when a neighbour passes and seems to mistake you for the woman who lived here before, the ex, which is shaming, and why shaming? For everything there is season etcetera. But it’s just one job. You’re very proud, and yet he says: great stuff, there is the whole back garden to do now.
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